It occurred to me yesterday, after hearing a podcast interview with Elizabeth Loftus, that this medical and surgical treatment of gender dysphoria, or supposed gender dysphoria, bears similarities to the recovered memories/satanic panic hysteria of the 80’s. At that time, a fad swept through the mental health professional community, and it ended up devastating patients (not to mention the people unfairly accused of satanic/sexual abuse of children). Imagine being led to believe, falsely, that your own father sexually abused you! Loftus describes how mental health professionals held conferences and spread their techniques of recovering repressed memories of sexual abuse through hypnosis through the country and abroad. After a few years, they were discredited and many of the psychologists ended up being sued, and only attorneys benefited in the end. I think there are many similarities with the rush to transition youth, just as others have pointed out the similarities to the lobotomy craze earlier in the 20th century. I even think that the discrediting of recovered memories through hypnosis made it impossible for REAL victims of sexual abuse who had hazy memories of it to be taken seriously, just as the transgender fad is going to make it difficult to take the real phenomenon of body dysphoria seriously when this is all over.

I just watched the old HBO movie about the McMartin case. The one in LA where they were accused of child abuse at the daycare and it was all garbage, from an unlicensed social worker supposedly extracting the memories from the kids. What she did was taunt and bait them if they said nothing happened. It was amazing. You have to wonder if when the cone of silence on transgender is lifted we’re going to hear stories like that about young people going to the gender therapist and when they had doubts about being trans were told ‘no you said it once, that’s forever’. And called neurotic and weak for doubting. Ugh.

Funny but I was going to watch HBO’s “Indictment” later because I was thinking of all the comparisons between transgender and the repressed memory/devil worship crap of the ’80s (which also bears disturbing psychological resemblance to the witch trials in America and Europe 3-400 years before). In both ‘witch hunts’ all logic and reality was suspended and people seemed perfectly willing to put their loved ones thru hell to maintain that suspension. Oddly, 300 years after Salem, some folks even got the daycare kids to claim tormentors danced naked in a circle around them. How did anyone believe this nuttiness? We will be asking that question of others in 20 years and books will be written, and fingers will point, and the dreadful damage will be done. McCarthyism and the mass pedophile cover up in the Catholic Church are other examples. In fact, in the movie “Spotlight” a psychiatrist calls that cover up, and the parents and church leaders willingness to go along with it, a ‘mass psychological phenomenon’. You cannot have critical analysis while this type of phenomenon happens. Well, you can, as Dr. Julia Long, for a fine example, has shown, but most people don’t listen, or they threaten or suppress. I don’t want to be a ‘herd animal’. So glad for a site like this.

Dr Paul McHugh, who called a halt to SRS at John Hopkins because he says GID is a mental illness that doesn’t need physical treatment, was a pioneer against recovered/false memory syndrome. His book on that topic is excellent.

Dr McHugh has already drawn attention to the similarities between recovered memory syndrome and the trans cult. I’m on my phone so links are beyond me but Paul McHugh has a website which outlines his thinking. He’s pretty conservative but pretty eminent too.

This hit me really hard. I am a woman in my 30s. If I were ten years younger, I can’t help but think that this woman’s story could have been my story too.

I was dysphoric as a pre-teen and teenager. I saw how my female peers began to get objectified by men as they hit puberty; I saw they way my female peers changed their own behavior as they hit puberty (becoming more passive, more frivolous, sexualized). It scared and disgusted me. I wanted nothing to do with it. I was horrified by my own puberty. I made myself as un-feminine as possible. I buzzed my hair, wore baggy, masculine clothes over sports bras, and made sure my gate stayed boyish. For several years, I even restricted my food intake in an effort to forestall secondary sex characteristics such as my period and development of my breasts.

Over time, I grew to understand how fucked up gender roles and sex stereotypes were, and how they had harmed me and many of my peers. I grew to understand that my problem wasn’t being a woman; my problems were sexism, misogyny, and stereotyping. I grew up to be a perfectly happy woman — just one who dislikes a lot of typically “girly” stuff; wears comfortable clothes and shoes; and fights sexism, harassment and misogyny when I see it.

I can’t help but think that if I’d experienced puberty in today’s world, I would have been under pressure to transition to male; and probably even convinced myself that I was actually trans. I probably would have been convinced that I needed serious medical intervention to grow up to be happy. That was obviously not the case. I am a woman and I am fully comfortable with that. I just needed to learn that I could be a woman on my own terms.

It scares me on behalf of woman coming of age today. What girl who loves school, athletics, and fun would take well to becoming a second-class citizen, defined and valued primarily for her sexual desirability rather than her intellect, her abilities, her individual strengths? Why wouldn’t “transition” seem like a good answer for tons of girls like me?

I don’t agree with a lot that’s posted on this blog. But I do think that the current discussion around gender is lacking much needed nuance and that this young woman’s story is a very important one.

“I saw they way my female peers changed their own behavior as they hit puberty (becoming more passive, more frivolous, sexualized). It scared and disgusted me. I wanted nothing to do with it.”

I remember that moment of horror- at say around age 11 or 12 when girls began pretending they were dumb, in order to flatter the boys/ become feminine/ assume their womanly role. It really shocked me, and I resolved to go the other way and be as smart as I could.

I had the exact same horrified reaction at that age when I felt the walls of womanhood closing in on me. My parents tried to get me to fall in line with other girls and act more deferent to boys, to hide my strength and intelligence so I wouldn’t be so “offputting”.

The funny thing is that I wore my hair long, didn’t object to standard girls’ clothing, and was never considered a tomboy, but that wasn’t enough for the patriarchal thought police.

And that’s why I never believe parents who say they “just” want their daughter to dress like everyone else. There’s always more to it than that.